Long-Awaited? 

Long-Awaited ebrary Has Arrived

While netLibrary and Questia struggled to establish themselves as the premier provider of academic and scholarly ebooks to the higher education market, ebrary quietly sat on the sidelines and watched. What ebrary saw was a great deal of complaining about netLibrary's pricing (150% list price) when only one person at a time could access the title. They also observed that students are not willing to pay $19.95/month of their own money for research materials that they cannot first evaluate and deem worthy of the price tag. Both netLibrary and Questia have experienced severe funding shortages and have dramatically reduced their staffing level (Questia is down to only 27 employees).

With the competition on its knees, ebrary launched its ebook system, ebrarian, in mid-January. Although libraries did not appear initially to be an important customer base for ebrary, libraries have become ebrary's core customer. Unlike netLibrary, any given title in ebrary's collection can be viewed by unlimited, simultaneous users. Moreover, a library purchases access to ebrary's entire, expanding collection and not on a title by title basis as is required by netLibrary. Unlike Questia, patrons can view all of the titles within ebrary's collection for free. However, a per page fee is charged for each print and/or copy transaction. The fees range from $.15 to $.50 and are determined by the publisher. [read more]

Question: Just exactly who's been waiting so long?

It's the book, stupid 

thought for the day by Gary Frost

The print original, its microfilm copy or its digital posting all provide access, but FotB suspects that CLIR (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2002 "The Preservation of Our Brittle Books Must Also Preserve Access" by Deanna B. Marcum and Anne R. Kenney) feels that the surrogate modes provide the "real" access, either over time as with film or with automated search and finding aids as with digital library building. The conventional print access from originals is discounted by disqualification of the source as "brittle" or vulnerable to deterioration. This consideration should really not disqualify print access in view of the relative permanence of the surrogate media!

FotB suggests that the inherent attributes of print access need more advocacy... [read more]

Rising Monopoly 

OCLC Closed Purchase of netLibrary

On January 24th, the sale of netLibrary to OCLC was finalized. netLibrary's purchase price was approximately $10 million, far less than the over $100 million that netLibrary raised in venture capital during its early years (from Rocky Mountain News). According to Publishers Weekly, netLibrary will remain in Boulder, under the oversight of Rob Kaufman, founder and CEO. The ebook operations will become a division of OCLC, while MetaText, a digital textbook company previously purchased by netLibrary, will become a for-profit subsidiary of OCLC.

As soon as the purchase of netLibrary was approved by the courts, OCLC announced changes to netLibrary's services and payment options. Effective January 24th, netLibrary discontinued access to its eBook Reader, a software that supported off-line viewing of netLibrary ebooks. In addition to low usage and general customer dissatisfaction with the software, netLibrary also attributes the decision to the growing number of titles in pdf format; a format that the eBook Reader does not support. [read more]

Future issue: Coming soon, to the net, electronic delivery monopoly.

Photography 

PhotoGraphic Libraries, Education resource

Digital Invasion 

Sanford Berman's original cataloging to be decommissioned

Folks, Sandy Berman called me today and left a message on my answering machine that contained some bad news. The list of user-centered original subject headings created by him and his staff over two and a half decades at Hennepin County Library is now going to be replaced in the catalog by straight LC subject headings, or something close to that. In Sandy's words, "The curtain is coming down." No hardcopy of the authority file currently exists, and there is no reason to expect that the administration at HCL (which forced Sandy into retirement) will take steps to preserve it. Sandy's ideas about user-centered cataloging live on in the books and articles that he has written. [read more]
(link via Library Juice)

Book Exhibitions Online 

Science and the Artist's Book

Science and the Artist's Book is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Special Collections. The resulting artist's books, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty, imaginative, and even poignant insights into the creative side of scientific research. [read more]

Libraries, bookstores and the USA Patirot Act  

Big John Wants Your Reading List by Nat Hentoff

During the congressional debate on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the act "would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items."

This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities."

Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents. [read more]

Turn out the lights 

Nasa's Earthlights

Free Virus Fix 

Free Defense against the Internet Worm KLEZ from Kaspersky Labs

In connection with the numerous instances of infection caused by the latest modification of the Internet worm Klez (Klez.e), Kaspersky Labs has developed a free utility for detecting and deleting this malicious program. The utility can be downloaded at KL corporate site.

We remind users that the first Klez version appeared this past October. Today, Kaspersky Labs knows of five Klez modifications, with the latest version, Klez.e, posing the most serious threat to computer safety.

Klez.e sends itself via e-mail utilizing SMTP for sending messages. The subject of the e-mail is randomly chosen from the following variants:

Hi,
Hello,
Re:
Fw:
how are you
let's be friends
darling
don't drink too much
your password
honey
some questions
please try again
welcome to my hometown
the Garden of Eden
introduction on ADSL
meeting notice
questionnaire
congratulations
sos!
japanese girl VS playboy
look,my beautiful girl friend
eager to see you
spice girls' vocal concert
Japanese lass' sexy pictures

The body of an infected message is empty or contains a random text. ...

... A free utility for detecting and deleting Klez can be downloaded here. We also recommend temporarily not using the preview function in e-mail programs. [read more]

(link via dangerousmeta!)

Library Globalization? 

OCLC's Stategis Globaloney

Facinating COLLIB-L Discussion thread via Library Juice